Hard Drives for Backup

[Tommy]

I'm looking for dependable 1.5 to 2 TB RAID drives with esata. I'd like to purchase 2 or 3 and spend around $2,000. The camera crew gets one, the editor gets one, and there's one to dump all the transcoded Prores footage onto. The safest option is to have all three drives devoted to the backing up the footage in which case I'd use my own 1TB drive to transcode the footage onto. I was considering buying the WD Mybook Studio 2 Edition but I've heard I shouldn't trust those drives. The problem is they fit perfectly within my budget. Now I'm looking at the CalDigit 1.5TB S2VR Duo but I'd only be able to afford a couple of those which means going back to the 2 drive backup scenario. Any suggestions? Is having only two hard drives as dangerous as I think it is? Are there any low cost hard drives that are dependable?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

CalDigit is the way to go. The S2VR is excellent. You can quickly swap drives in and out of it. When using it in RAID-1 (mirror) mode for offloading, you have the redundancy of two HDD copies out of one unit right off the bat.

HDD should be viewed as temporary storage anyway. Although, some people don't seem to agree with that, it's been discussed on these forums to death.. Beyond that actually, this horse has been beat to a bloody pulp.

Definitely don't trust any of the MyBook products -- I can say from personal experience that they are crap. I highly recommend CalDigit -- solid products and the one time I had to call them for support, they answered the phone and actually could help me.

 

[Martin Weiss]

Sonnet´s F2 package looks quite sweet for on-the-set backups. Portable, Raid 0 or 1, fast, bus-powered. 700 bucks. Anyone has used those?

Edit: Link is http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusionf2.html

 

[William Wedig]

What about a post storage option? I was referred to look at the Burly systems on this board (I think). I'm looking at needing around 3-4 Tera of storage for a feature. As per price, I'd like to keep that under $3,500 USD or so if possible. I've heard mixed things about eSATA.
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/BurlyPortMultiEncl.php

I'll edit offline in 960X720 DVCpro HD on whatever external Firewire 800 drive I can get my grubby little hands on, while leaving the Burly system basically untouched as the media backup.

Thoughts?

 

[feeonac]

Hard Drive

Hard Drive

Hi

I'm just about to start assisting on a RED feature. I've been old that the director tends to shoot about 1.5 - 2 hours a day. I need to copy footage from the cards and then get the media into avid. I've figured out the workflow, but I'm looking at how much storage I'll need. They plan to shoot 3K.

Does anyone know somewhere that you can buy hard drives in bulk at a reduced price. They want everything backed up, so I could end up needing a lot of space as they are filming for 50 days!

Any suggestions or storage advice would be great!

Thanks

Fiona

 

[Paul Hazlett]

Hi

I'm just about to start assisting on a RED feature. I've been old that the director tends to shoot about 1.5 - 2 hours a day. I need to copy footage from the cards and then get the media into avid. I've figured out the workflow, but I'm looking at how much storage I'll need. They plan to shoot 3K.

Does anyone know somewhere that you can buy hard drives in bulk at a reduced price. They want everything backed up, so I could end up needing a lot of space as they are filming for 50 days!

Any suggestions or storage advice would be great!

Thanks

Fiona

there are plenty of places that do bulk purchases if you do a search but more
importantly than any other component in the box is what brand hard drive.

From what I have read Hitachi drives are the least likely to cause problems.
The red drive has them and alot of mission critical servers use them.

Any hard drive can fail at any time, I know from first hand experience, WD,maxtor, seagate have all failed on me so I try to buy the best, most durable drives possible. the box they are in is important but not nearly as important as the contents within.